23 September 2010 3:54 PM

You will remember that vast and panicked eurozone bail-out fund announced in Brussels earlier this year. In the turmoil of the crisis in Greece, the EU and IMF announced a joint package worth €750bn -- about £640bn. It was a rig-up, of course, thoroughly against the spirit and letter of European law which said one member of the eurozone could not bail-out another.

It was meant to be a shock-and-awe defence against financial market 'speculators' -- ie, investors who knew Greece was going belly-up, despite being in the single currency -- a sort of 'see you and raise you' poker play by the EU. I was there at the press centre at the European Council when it was announced (at 2.30 on a Monday morning, don't say I don't earn my money) with a flourish that was very nearly, 'Ah, ha! Gotcha!' The amount was meant to be so vast it would shut down any idea in the financial markets that a eurozone country could default on its debts.

So, how that shock-and-awe 'stability facility' going for the near-insolvent countries clinging to the periphery of the eurozone? Not so stable. Here is an assessment out today from the analysts at Hobart Capital Markets in London:

'Most commentators were in pure ecstasy when the ECB and IMF announced the EUR 750bn bail-out package."Shock and awe, ! "PIIGS saved" etc etc were the platitudes so freely given.'

'It is incredible how much noise is out there! While we were very sceptical then, current PIIGS sovereign yield spreads over Bunds are at a record and have clearly proven us correct.'

'Absolute rates are at a high in Ireland, and near crisis highs for Portugal and Greece. The most optimistic interpretation would be that without the bail-out, rates and spreads would be higher still. But looking from the perspective of stressed and non-stressed rate levels, the bail-out package has been a HUGE FAILURE!'

'To add insult to injury, the three biggest rating agencies, Moody's, S&P and Fitch (whose super-duper ratings have proven sooo very helpful in preventing of this crisis) have just rated the ECB/IMF bail-out fund AAA, the highest possible rating.'

'This is funny, as the supporting members of the ECB (and its bail-out package) do not all have an AAA rating. So how can they as a group be rated AAA? This reeks of the same mistakes made in the CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligations) space.'

'And don't get us started about dwindling EU member support for the bail-out.'

Mrs Thatcher told the eurocrats decades ago, but they just refuse to learn: you can't buck the markets. Not even with a stack of poker chips worth £640bn.

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22 September 2010 7:59 PM

This man on the right is Sven Giegold, a German member of the European Parliament and a member of the left-wing Green party. Of course, you didn't vote him in and you can't vote him out, but he is one of the Strasbourg heavies controlling these new financial regulations. In other words, this left-wing German has more control over the fate of Britain's financial services industry than any member of the British Government or the House of Commons.

So you might want to listen to what he has to say about the right of any EU member state to control its own taxes and finance. Short version of what he has to say: 'No right at all.'

Giegold was talking to the Irish State broadcaster, RTE, this morning. Asked how alarmed he was at the moment about bond spreads, he said: 'I am very alarmed because it is not only an Irish phenomenon. [Irish spreads are second only to Greek spreads]. We have the same size in Greece and we have several other countries where speculators might come next.'

Just a note: usually people and institutions who buy bonds are called 'investors' but for the Greens there are only speculators. Wait until they get to 'capitalist parasites.' It'll come.

He says the existence of these spreads 'shows there is something wrong with the regulation of the economy in the eurozone. In a common currency zone bond spreads should normally not exist or be very small.'

Note again: in fact, the thing that drove the borrowing frenzy and subsequent property bubble in the now-desperate peripheral economies in the eurozone was that after the single currency was launched, the markets were lulled into believing exactly that -- that Greek or Irish or Portuguese debt was as safe as German or Dutch debt because their economies all shared the euro.

Yet the Green goes on: 'That this is not the case shows the necessity that we really come to a common economic policy where the different privileges which we see in the different member states are basically reduced.'

So, watch how that slides: what were once considered the sovereign powers of Parliament to control Britain's economic policy have now slided in Strasbourg to 'privileges.' Which can be reduced...

And what national 'privileges' would he have in mind to reduce?

'In southern Europe there was excessive indebtedness, which is not acceptable.' Actually, Herr Giegold, Italy has the highest rate of private savings in Europe. But do carry on:

'In Ireland as in Luxembourg, you are keeping taxes low and refusing European cooperation and therefore basically taking away legitimate tax base of countries such as France, Germany and others. And I think what we need in the eurozone is that all countries give up their illegitimate preferences' -- in plain English, that means is give up the determination by a Government to act in the best interests of it's own citizens -- 'in order to have economic and monetary stability as a common good.'

What about a struggling country such as Ireland turning to the eurozone special stabilisation fund?

'I think if Ireland would do this, this is legitimate. But of course we would ask questions first, whether there is more cooperation to harmonise certain tax measures in Europe, for instance, to agree with the common consolidated tax base where I think Ireland is following a more egoistic approach which I regard not as legitimate.'

Bingo. Ireland loses the right to control its own low rate of corporation tax. Which is tricky, since the only growth in the Irish economy is coming from the multinationals who settle there for the tax breaks.

'All of us in the European Union have to learn to think in the terms of the common good, not in short-term national vested interest.'

So, what this German MEP is saying is, 'European interests good, British interests bad.'

He is saying so-called national 'illegitimate privileges' must be abolished as the means to the end of building an ever closer union, a union with a 'legal personality' as it is expressed in the Lisbon Treaty -- or a country called Europe among those of us who like to talk straight.

And when this no-borders, no 'egoistic' interests, no national interests, supreme Brussels-Strasbourg Soviet Union is built? It will be such a paradise, not doubt, that men such as Herr Giegold will have to build a wall to keep the most dynamic peoples of the world out. Or would that be, keep them in? That's what happened last time. And I can remember when the German border guards would shoot dead anyone who tried to escape from the 'non-egoistic' paradise built in East Germany by such lefties as the forerunners of this Green MEP.

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This video clip of Nigel Farage tearing into the European Commission's President Barroso after the eurocrat's pompous 'State of the Union' message to the European Parliament was sent to me by a City of London analyst.

Apparently it is making the rounds as a 'must watch.'

How heartening to think this is what gets the blood pumping among the pin-striped chaps.

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It's not just we euro-realist journalists in British newspapers who have nailed Cameron as the Conservative leader who has led his party into abandoning Conservative resistance to the EU's encroaching powers.

Across the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal has seen it, too. Today the paper says: 'Almost unnoticed, his MPs have voted for a list of measures that would a few years ago have triggered a full-scale war. There was the expansion of justice and home-affairs powers, involving the extension of the so-called European arrest warrant. The European External Action Service -- or EU diplomatic service -- was nodded through. New regulations for the City of London require the establishment of three pan-European supervisory bodies. This was accepted by the Treasury and if there were protests from the Conservative benches they didn't make much noise. A higher budget for the EU has been approved.'

'Ask senior Conservatives about all this and they point to the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, enthusiasts for integration. It necessitates compromise.'

'But that is the myth designed to make Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg feel good. Mr Cameron had decided long before he failed to win an overall majority at the general election that he was not going to die in a ditch over Europe.'

Which just about sums up David Cameron: 'What? Me, die in a ditch to save my country's sovereignty? Certainly not. It would end my glossy career.'

Too right Cameron wouldn't die in a ditch for his country.

Last week Britain celebrated The Few. Today Britain is left with The Quisling.

-- 0 --

Meanwhile the Brussels-based EU Observer reports that the Belgian politicians running the presidency of the European Council for six months plan to hurry up plans to establish an EU-wide public prosecutor. This euro-cop 'would be able to override national investigators or even order them to start an inquiry.' It is all part of the continuing push towards what the Brussels jargon calls a 'common justice area,' known in plain English as the destruction of national control over criminal investigation and prosecution.

This would take the eurocratic power into wiretaps, monitoring of bank activity, access to DNA data bases, and too much of the rest.

The Belgian justice minister -- just think about that phrase, 'the Belgian justice minister,' and then think about the fate of too many Belgian children and the escape from justice of too many sexual perverts: what a country to be talking about justice -- anyway, the minister said that the EU needs 'better instruments' such as this euro-prosecutor to achieve cross-border arrests.

Sorry, do you hear any roaring Tory protests on this one? No, of course not. The party are pretending that they could stop all this with a veto. But do you image a Cameron-Clegg Government is going to start vetoing moves towards 'ever-closer union?' If so, go back and read the top of this post again. It's not going to happen.

Anyway, as the euro-reform think tank Open Europe points out: 'The UK has a veto over the proposal, which would prevent the prosecutor from being established in the UK. However, under the rules of the Lisbon Treaty' -- the treaty Cameron has refused to challenge -- 'nine member states may go ahead with the proposal if they wish, under so-called "enhanced cooperation." While the European prosecutor would not be able to bring cases in Britain' -- here come my italics -- 'he would still be able to issue European Arrest Warrants to force UK citizens to face prosecution in another member state without asking the permission of the Government or the Director of Public Prosecutions.'

It is contemptible that Cameron doesn't think protecting British men and women from this is worth fighting for. The Tory party, in letting him get away with it, is equally contemptible.

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16 September 2010 11:33 AM

Today I'm back down in the press room at the European Council, while upstairs Herman Van Rompuy and the EU heads of state and government and their foreign ministers are trying to agree how to big-up the EU in foreign affairs.

In the jargon, that's 'how to give new momentum to the Union's external relations.'

Of course, if all that these European empire-builders want to do is to get the world to pay attention to them, I've always said the easiest way would be for them to get Germany to build a whacking great army. Instead Van Rompuy and the rest imagine that the way for the EU to gain more global influence is to take 'full advantage of the opportunities provided by the Lisbon Treaty.'

In other words, building up eurocratic wheezes such as Baroness Ashton's new EU diplomatic corps. So far, of the 28 heads of delegation named (in other words, 28 new EU ambassadors), a majority are officials of the EU institutions.

Or did you imagine that members of the professional and experienced diplomatic corps of the member states were going to be allowed to dominate the service? Certainly not. First the idea is to have EU diplomats who have already been cleansed of their loyalty to their own countries, so taking them pre-bleached from Brussels is actually easier than having to re-programme career diplomats who are used to going around the world thinking of what's best for, say, Britain or Poland. Nope. Now the cry has to be, 'What's good for the EU is good for Britain!' Or Poland. Fill in the blank.

Also, did you imagine the eurocrats were going to let this fabulous cream jug of embassies and expense accounts go to any more outsiders than was necessary? Not likely.

Meanwhile, I can take some joy in this: despite all the multi-millions of euros in propaganda spent by the European Commission and the rest, a poll just out from the respected German Marshall Fund shows that there is little support for the euro in the countries that use the single currency. Here are some details:

'There was little support for Europe's common currency in the countries surveyed that use the euro. When asked whether using the euro has been a good or bad thing for their country's economy, almost all majorities in the eurozone sample responded negatively. The euro was not appealing from the outside either. Majorities of the British (83%) and Polish (53%) and a plurality of Bulgarians (42%) thought that using the euro would be a bad thing for their economies.'

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07 September 2010 4:31 PM

It's bad enough being corralled here in the press room of the European Council without knowing that upstairs the Chancellor George Osborne has been handing over the keys to the City of London to a bunch of Continentals and eurocrats with not a financial services industry between them.

The Chancellor came out beaming, claiming that in allowing new EU-level financial supervision, 'We have a deal which is good for Britain.'

As Bugs Bunny once put it, 'What a maroon.'

I won't invite you to follow me into the thicket of changes, but as Michel Barnier, the Frenchman who is the commissioner in charge of the internal market and services, said this morning, what they are doing here is building an entire financial services and regulation 'architecture' and now the EU institutions will fill it in 'brick by brick.'

Otherwise known as power creep.

What's made it somehow worse is that the meetings over these two days have been chaired, first, by Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who is now the president of the European Council, and by Didier Reynders, the Finance Minister of Belgium, the country which holds the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. (Note the subtle difference in the names of the council. I blame Van Rompuy. Seems he's been bigging up his council into the 'real' European Council, while the other seems to have been demoted to being a kind of umbrella group for organising ministers' meetings. Not that it's got a smaller staff now. Certainly not. Staff numbers, like spending budgets, only ever go up in Brussels.)

The point is that these two key chairmen come from Belgium, which is as near as you can get to being a non-country. So just who are they supposed to be representing? And why should we think that, having made a hash of their own country, they ought to be turned loose on the other 26 in the EU?

How bad is it now in Belgium? The place had its general election in June and its politicians still haven't been able to put together a government. At the weekend, the French-speaking socialist, Elio Di Rupo, resigned from his role as head of negotiations. Now the king, who knows he will be minus one country and therefore out of a throne if Belgium breaks up, has called for a Dutch-speaking politician and another French-speaking politician to have a go at the talks.

It is pretty unlikely they will have any success. The two halves of the country, the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings, just don't have enough common ground for agreement. Many of the Flemings, who form a majority of the population of Belgium, want out. As the leader of the largest party in the country, Bart De Wever, a Flemish separatist put it earlier this year, he would like Belgium to 'evaporate.'

Last Sunday the Fleming separatists engaged in an annual demonstration of riding bikes around the boundary of Brussels to remind the people of the city that they are surrounded by Flanders.

Yet Brussels, thanks to generations of manipulation by those trying to wash away the Dutch culture of the city, is now a majority French-speaking city.

Apparently during the negotiations the politicians asked if a corridor linking Brussels south to French speaking Wallonia could be established.

Great. A sort of Berlin airlift corridor to Keep Brussels French.

The kind of minds who think that's the way to run a country are now chairing committees with the power to decide the fate of Britain's financial services industry.

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02 September 2010 5:52 PM

You might not have noticed but heaven knows it is the sort of thing they notice at the Commission: a few days ago a Eurobarometer poll was published which showed that support for the EU is falling all across the Continent. Fewer than half of the citizens of European Union member states now think that belonging to the EU is a good thing for their country.

This isn't supposed to happen. Indeed, the Commission has an annual euro-propaganda budget of at least £2.3bn to make sure it doesn't happen. But somehow it has. The more the people of Europe have of 'more Europe,' the less they like it.

Not that the Brussels elite whose lush careers depend on 'more Europe' will accept that people increasingly dislike the EU because they know more and more about it.

No, the minute the poll was published, the commission was twisting the results with a press handout headlined: 'EU citizens favour stronger European economic governance.' It claimed that 92 percent of people think the EU has set the right priorities for economic recovery.

Whaaa? 92 percent? The last time I saw a figure of that sort support was in one of the Soviet elections. Yes, Leonid Brezhnev was 92 percent loved, and the figures proved it.

Viviane Reding, the Luxembourger commissioner in charge of the propaganda department known as 'communications,' even
insisted: 'The clear majority for enhanced European economic governance
shows that people see the EU as a decisive part of the solution to the
crisis.' She wants us to believe that 75 percent of the people in EU countries are in favour of giving the EU -- ie, people like her -- a stronger role in the coordination of member states' economic and budgetary policies.

Mats Persson, the head of the Open Europe think tank, took that kind of absurd commission spinning apart in an article for the Swedish news site Europaportalen. Mats has paraphrased the piece for me in English.

He wrote that such overwhelming support for EU interference just doesn't appear anywhere else in the poll. What else doesn't appear anywhere in the poll is the role of the EU or the term 'European economic governance.' All there is is a woolly question about whether or not you think it would be effective to combat the current crisis with 'a stronger coordination of economic and financial policies among all the EU Member States.'

The propaganda merchants at the commission couldn't resist massaging the result, adding up two groups of different answers into an omnibus 75 percent figure, then repackaging it as three-quarters of all the people of the EU member states being in favour of giving the EU more powers to monitor national economies. But that was never the question.

Mats took apart other commission 'interpretations' of the figures, and then noted, ''The commission's Eurobarometer is very expensive -- almost 27,000 people were interviewed face-to-face -- begging the question whether taxpayers' money really should be used in this way.'

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, tried to spin the poll, too. Almost as soon as it was out, he was onto the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to insist that the fault for the falling support rests with the governments of member states.

He said that when things go wrong, the governments blame it on the
EU, but they take all the credit for the things Brussels accomplishes:
'I problemi non si risolveranno fino a che ogni nazione non vede il progetto europeo come il suo progetto.' My recent year in Rome tells me what Barroso meant is that the problems will not be resolved until each nation sees the European project as its own project.

In other words, according the Barroso, what is causing the unpopularity of the EU among the people of the 27 EU countries is that the governments of Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the rest just pig-headedly insist on looking after their own nations first instead of looking after the interests of the EU first.

He spins the poll until its results are meaningless . So much for the value of the Eurobarometer poll. Once the results get through the mincer at the commission, they bear no resemblance to how the answers went in.

Yet the commission will go on ordering Eurobarometer to go on running polls. Eurobarometer is the commission's own creature, after all. And no matter what the results say about people wanting to get the EU out of their lives, the eurocrats will go on insisting the problem is 'communication.' They will insist, as they always do, that if 'EU citizens' (may the phrase burn in hell) only knew more about all the wonderful work the EU is doing for them, they would learn to love the EU just as much as the eurocrats themselves do.

At which point the reasoning of boss eurocrat Barroso and the other eurocrats turns into the reasoning of the stalker, insisting that if only the young woman would get to know him, she would realise how much he loves her, and how much she really -- though she resists it -- loves him. He knows he's the only man for her. It is only others -- the eurosceptic press, the governments of member states -- who are poisoning her mind against him.

And he'll stand outside her house at midnight every night and follow her to work everyday until she admits the truth. Then surely she will she will submit to an ever closer union...

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Just a follow-up to my blog of August 23rd on the attempts to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero: Human Events, the long-established Capitol Hill journal, has published reports that reveal Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man who plans to be the Imam at the multi-million dollar mosque, 'owns taxpayer-subsidised apartment buildings in Hudson County [the part of New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan] where the tenants have made municipal health complaints including rat, roach and bedbug infestations, seeping toilets, leaks, urine soaked hallways, no heat and no hot water.'

'Despite millions of dollars in government subsidies, Rauf has trouble maintaining several small apartment buildings in North Bergen, Palisades Park and Union City.'

Connie Hair, Congressional correspondent for Human Events, also notes a recent report from the New York Post, which said: 'The mosque developers are tax deadbeats. Sharif El-Gamal,the leading organiser behind the mosque and community centre near Ground Zero, owes $224,270.77 in back property tax on the site, city records show. El-Gamal's company, 45 Park Place Partners, failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July, according to the city Finance Department.'

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01 September 2010 11:26 AM

Well of course the EU-capitulating Foreign Secretary William Hague has had to deny rumours about his alleged relationship with his new aide, 25-year old Chris Myers. If a Cabinet Minister pushing 50 is still walking around the streets dressed like this with a young man-friend, he is just inviting (totally unfounded) speculation.

So I offer a few examples of other couples of man-friends whose style might be a template for Hague and Myers. A change of style could erase all doubt they are as butch as anyone.

The first is a couple of German officers relaxing together near Stalingrad. How undeniably heterosexual do they look?

Next, one of the great masculine couples of history, the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

And finally the ultimate butch twosome in any society, a couple of firemen, These from the 1870s, the kind of conservative period that ought to suit a pair of Tories such as Hague and Myers.

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MARY ELLEN SYNON

Mary Ellen Synon is based in Brussels as a columnist at the Irish Daily Mail and contributor to the Mail on Sunday.

At other times she has worked as: a columnist at the Irish Sunday Independent and the Sunday Business Post, Ireland correspondent and later Europe correspondent at the Economist, an associate producer at CBS News 60 Minutes based in London, and a reporter for the Daily Telegraph.

Early in her career she was awarded a travelling fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to allow her to study the Common Market.